Comment

Men have to hide, but women have easy access to pink pornography

In those societies where people still read books and not just gape at sex on the internet, men have to furtively share their collections of porn, tatty books, covered in paper, hidden carefully from the disapproving eyes of wives and girlfriends and so also to avoid polluting daughters while wondering when to initiate sons. When women want porn, they walk into a bookshop, head to the ‘romance’ section and hit the honey pot. Men think that these books are all Lizzie Bennett and Darcy, so the women leave them around and read them openly. Ideal bedtime companions. Like hot chocolate. Like hell.

Of course, you can and will argue that pulp writers like Harold Robbins made sure their readers got a good dose of hard core sex. But see, those writers had to have pages and pages of story, plot, characters and theme before you got to the sex part. And after a couple of well-thumbed pages, the story started again. In fact, some people read the whole book for the story.

For the ladies, the story has turned. A book available in Mumbai’s bookshops appears to masquerade as standard chick lit. That is, the back cover tells you some usual pap about four female friends and their diverse lives. The first page follows one of those women as she shops in a supermarket. One paragraph down she reaches the fruits section, picks up a fig, imagines that it looks like a testicle and then proceeds to sexually assault it. After the fig, she attacks several other fruit and all the while, a stunned security guard watches her on the closed circuit TV. You can imagine what happens to him. In fact, you don’t have to imagine it. The writer tells you. This book is not by Nancy Friday, Anais Nin or any one of those writers who are discussed in open inverted commas. This is standard stuff.

Is there, then, a whiff of hypocrisy surrounding this subject? It is true that women need romance and that uncontextual sex — barring the occasional irresistible fig of course — is depressing. But once placed within the bare bones of a story and plot (man meets woman, man and woman spar, man or woman spurns woman or man, man and woman declare undying love), you are then free to throw in as much sex as possible. This is not a few throbbing unnamed muscles blending into some soft body parts. This is sex.

Undoubtedly, all this is very welcome. Society, they tell us, is opening up the world over. Why should women be denied their right to sexual excitement? After all, reading an issue of Cosmo today is like reading a “saucy” novel about 50 years ago. Lady Chatterley’s Lover reads today like a parody. The book that was once banned for its obscene content is hardly read any more. Literary wise there’s good reason. Otherwise, can it compare to sex with strawberries in a supermarket aisle?

But while every woman knows all this and Mills and Boon, Silhouette, Harlequin and all the rest have long changed from that one soul-fulfilling kiss at the end to various categories of sex on every other page, chick lit has clearly taken it to another level. Even if it is unclear whether Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, published in 1996, qualifies as chick lit, it is about a woman who used some hot sex to feel cool again. It was a wild bestseller and was also made into a movie. Helen Fielding, who wrote the Bridget Jones series, the grandmummy of it all, didn’t quite get the sex thing though.

And her inability or reluctance

is echoed in our writers. Indian women purveyors of chick lit and romance are still reluctant to slay their inner sexually repressed female. Indeed, this fear of sex writing crosses the gender divide in India. We have breached many barriers as writers but even as our literary paths are strewn with Nobels and Bookers, we also win the bad sex award. Deservedly: there’s schoolboy prurience and schoolgirl missishness about our written sex. Today, we have a burst of chick lit novels upon us, but while all these young girls assure us that they have sex often, it is often coy sex (“perfect make out session in progress”) rather than hot and heavy or down and dirty or turned on by figs (which incidentally, DH Lawrence thought looked particularly female to him, which shows how things have changed and women will no longer be held hostage to fruit imagery).

The world of sex between the covers would become ideal if two things happened: Indian women purveyors of make-out sessions could truly free themselves and simultaneously, if men could be free head to their own romance section to pick up whatever they wanted. They don’t have to call it romance: we don’t have to embarrass the men quite so much but they can find another name. Relationships?
Relations? Social intercourse?

Of course, there’s always the internet.

Email: b_ranjona@dnaindia.net